The Return?ro;”for Better or Worse?ro;”of Bridget Riley, 60s Art-World "It" Girl

Bridget Riley Bridget Riley, despite her new position as grande dame of British art, is a living lesson in the fickle character of artistic fashion. The consummate It girl of international art in the 1960s, the attractive, talented Riley once seemed poised at the edge of a brilliant career, mere millimeters away from chalking up indisputable artistic successes like Yankee baseball pennants. Opinion split, then veered away from her work?first in America, then elsewhere?temporarily relegating her to underserved oblivion, judging her optically mesmerizing work to be, as it were, this year's model. Copied freely by graphic designers and fashion magazines, repeated ad nauseam by ready-to-wear manufacturers, emblazoned on the miniskirt and halter-top prints of the hallucinogenic age, Riley's hand-painted, straight and waveform lines were commodified before she could explain their significance or utter a word of protest. A backlash ensued, in that bygone era of anticommercial high-mindedness. When the smoke cleared, Riley's art had been savaged, judged gimmicky in its optical effects and considered to be the epitome of a trendy and opportunistic stylistic turnover. Later, Riley predicted it would take "at least 20 years" before anyone seriously looked at her paintings again. As critic Michael Kimmelman noted in his August New York Times profile, in America it took more than 30.

Bridget Riley, Entice 2, 1974 Buoyed by the same tide of artistic fashion that once banished her, Bridget Riley is currently riding high on various trends that claim her influence but, once again, have little or nothing to do with her art as she intended it. Refusing, as she recently stated in an interview, to make of her gender either an artistic issue or a fetish, Riley has become of late an important reference with young postfeminists who make a point of rejecting the label "woman artist." Among today's young British artists and critics, she has become a fashionable and reliable touchstone, a symbol of innovation, independence and resilience in the face of a hostile (read American) art world. And, finally, Riley's buzzing, bending paintings have had an impact on a generation of younger abstract painters. Yet these artists have picked up her work not with reverence for her monastic, late modernist ideals, but instead as faded, eye-catching kitsch that, until quite recently, ran completely against the establishment grain. Bridget Riley's long-awaited end-around to center stage began in earnest only two years ago with a modest overview of her work in the south of England. Rave reviews in the London papers led to a major retrospective of her paintings at London's Serpentine Gallery. A subsequent show at the Kunstverein in Dusseldorf guaranteed that her resurrection would not be simply a British phenomenon. Last spring, the behemoth Tate Modern opened with a whole room devoted to Riley's paintings. Then New York played host to twin Bridget Riley exhibitions: one, a show of studies of paintings from the 1960s and works from the 80s and 90s at PaceWildenstein gallery, closed recently to positive notices; the other, a 25-year survey of the artist's work at Chelsea's Dia Center for the Arts, focuses now on key paintings of the 1960s and 1970s and is up well into the new year.

Titled "Reconnaissance," the Dia exhibition looks to reintroduce Riley's subtle, delicately calibrated early work to an unprejudiced, younger New York audience. Never mentioning the terms "Op Art," which Riley abhors, "Retinal Art" or "Perceptual Abstraction," which is the artist's preferred term, the exhibition presents the artist's illusionistic paintings in pure, Adamic fashion, hung inside Dia's pristine minimalist space like dense, juicy apples before the fall. Running backwards from rich, opulently bright paintings like Samarra (1984) to Movement in Squares (1961), a breakthrough painting the artist executed after seeing a rain shower disturb the tiles of an Italian piazza, "Reconnaissance" reconnoiters Riley's career from her early vibrant black-and-white paintings to later works that pulse with a blaze of precise, variegated color.

Continually engaged in what she terms "phenomena hunting," Riley's early buzzing black-and-white works launched her effort to make visible the ephemeral, revelatory quality of surprise built into visual pleasure. Looking to arrest the phenomenological instant, she settled on an advancing set of arrangements of abstract pictorial units, such as straight or curved lines, dots, squares, triangles, chevrons and the like. In time, these riveting arrangements brought for her an awareness of the color shadings implied by her minimalist blacks and whites. Adding gray to her paintings to heighten the essential role played by contrast in the color phenomenon, Riley followed her controlled experiment by the use of primary colors, then by a shimmering if restricted order of pastels she selected after a visit to the ruins and sarcophagi of Egypt.

Influenced early by Seurat's pointillist effort to get down a system of perception and by the dynamic, staggered line of futurists like Giacomo Balla, Riley developed a style that was all rhythms, tonalities and infinitesimal shifts, producing in turn her characteristically supercharged, regimented versions of eye candy. A painting like Crest (1964), for example (essentially a canvas-wide repetition of uniform snaking, swooping black lines on a plain white background), if looked at hard comes close to the experience of watching filament vibrate in a light bulb. The paintings Samarra and Apres-Midi (1981), while built on the same quarter-inch accumulation of lines, achieve in their respective movements of colors like teal, tan, pink, green, black and jawbreaker red distinct yet essentially similar rhythmic effects.

However appealing Riley's paintings appear, though, there is a catch to them that is both visual and philosophical. Having recently declared abstraction a very powerful answer to this spiritual challenge of an unavailable truth, a means of expression beyond limits, she shows not just her age but the old age of the stale, overweening ideology of pure abstraction; an ideology that failed precisely where its universalist ambition approached principled, reductivist hubris?in interviews she can sound like Mondrian's shade. Riley's singular dedication to doing her signature perceptual compositions, while admirable in fact, also queries a monotonous hypothetical scenario: Would we not, if Bridget Riley's fortunes had been different back in 1965, have by now seriously tired of her extremely good-looking but essentially one-note paintings?

"Bridget Riley: Reconnaissance," through June 17, 2001, at Dia Center for the Arts, 548 W. 22 St. (betw. 10th & 11th Aves.), 989-5566.